Glasgow Jazz Festival

Reviews: YolanDa Brown brought a touch of showbiz glitz to Glasgow Jazz Festival in a Tron Theatre filled to near-capacity on Sunday. The saxophonist and 2008 MOBO Awards Best Jazz Artist�s presentation style won�t be for everyone but she certainly involves the audience.

YolanDa Brown, Tron Theatre
Star rating: ***

YolanDa Brown brought a touch of showbiz glitz to Glasgow Jazz Festival in a Tron Theatre filled to near-capacity on Sunday. The saxophonist and 2008 MOBO Awards Best Jazz Artist's presentation style won't be for everyone but she certainly involves the audience, homing in on a young lad to let him dictate the musical direction of a special festival tune and letting some mature females decide which band member they'd like to be introduced to next.

The special festival tune turned out to be a rather routine blues one, but rather routine playing, albeit at length and of familiar tunes given gentle makeovers, is what Brown does. It's the way she sells it that gets her audience approval. Striding on in her gold shoes with matching dress - she returned for the second half in something more sober - she comes over as a glammed up holiday rep.

Her band, solid players all, are the grooving, soul jazz springboard for tenor and soprano saxophone balladry and dancing tributes to locations including Nigeria and the island of St Thomas, courtesy of Sonny Rollins's calypso of the same name. She hardly stands still for a heartbeat, sashaying as she plays, encouraging handclapping and taking her soprano for a stroll up the aisle. The overall effect is of an end of pier jazz show but my guess is, it's bringing new people to the music.

Johnny Mercer Centenary Concert, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
Star rating: ****

Short of bringing back Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Chet Baker from the dead, it would be difficult to think of a more apt way to celebrate the centenary of the great lyricist Johnny Mercer than the all-star show staged at the Concert Hall on Sunday night.

Three of the UK's best jazz singers - Carol Kidd, Clare Teal and Todd Gordon - served up a couple of sets of Mercer songs and demonstrated the range of his talent. If ever a writer was beloved by jazz singers it's Mercer, and it was a treat to hear his poetic lyrics delivered with such care and enthusiasm.

The dynamic Clare Teal's uptempo take on I'm Old Fashioned was the first of many highlights, along with her powerfully belted-out Blues In the Night, and, especially, her duet with elegant pianist Laurie Holloway on I Wanna Be Around.

Todd Gordon's invitation to the audience to join in on Goody Goody unleashed the jazz singer in most of the 1500-strong crowd but it was his interpretations of Mercer's haunting torch songs One For My Baby and When The World Was Young (both duets with piano) which stood out.

And then there was Carol Kidd whose performances of three of Mercer's most beautiful songs (Skylark, This Time The Dream's On Me and Moon River) surpassed all expectation. She may have made it through her exquisite reading of Moon River (with gorgeous accompaniment from guitarist Nigel Clark) without crying - but nobody else did. Not even our debonair host for the night, Sir Michael Parkinson, whose informal yet authoritative presenting style made this an altogether classier-than-normal affair.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw, The Arches, Glasgow
Star rating: ***

I'm not certain what A Hawk and a Hacksaw must have thought about the metal barrier between them and their audience as they made their Glasgow debut on Sunday night. For the punters, it was an unwelcome sight and, psychologically, more than a physical barrier. It was, perhaps, a lack of judgement on the part of the venue's management, as it was hardly a gig requiring crowd control.

I knew very little of Hawk and a Hacksaw and their minimalist onstage repartee (not even any song titles, I'm afraid) shed little more light. The five-piece hail from New Mexico and feature Jeremy Barnes on accordion, Heather Trost on violins, augmented by trumpet, tuba and bouzouki. This peculiar ensemble created a heady mix; a soundclash that meets somewhere between Tex-mex and the Balkans. A quarter of a century ago this was the kind of thing which would have been assured a residency at the Mayfest Club.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw's music evokes the spirit of the Weimar and despite their American roots, is based in a grainy eastern European tradition. Whilst occasionally testing the music was uplifting, joyous and fun, with Trost's performance on the rarely seen Stroh violin (it has a horn on the end of it) mesmerising.

For the encore the band, perhaps flicking a vee at the separatists, crossed the barrier, to an ecstatic audience reaction.